Total Quality Management and Music That Stirs the Soul

Total Quality Management and Music That Stirs the Soul

Article excerpt

There's a moment in the movie "Amadeus" that always makes the
hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Young Mozart plays the
piano before Emperor Joseph II. Salieri, the reigning musician of
the day, is disguised by a mask in the background. Mozart sits
and begins a Salieri score. Then he starts to improvise, and a
voluptuous burst of trills and arpeggios fills the air. The
stolid music is wondrously transformed.

I thought about "Amadeus" after reading a Newsweek story
(March 1992) which quoted Robert D. Knoll of Consumer Reports:
"The Americans are building nice average cars but few
`geeizok-atis' cars." The Japanese, on the other hand, have
"upped the ante in what the experts call the more subtle
`sensory' side of a car's quality," Newsweek claims, such as a
"turngnal lever that doesn't wobble (and) the feel of a
climatentrol knob."

I offer these observations as an indictment of total quality
management as it is generally practiced. Doing things perfectly
(TQM) is important. Doing things well may be ever more
important.

Salieri composed "zerofects" music _ that was deadly. Mozart
played Salieri's work flawlessly. But had that been all, none of
us would know Mozart's name today. Likewise, in our day,
perfectly produced cars that roar to life at 20 below zero don't
win hardre loyalists _ unless they also score well on the
"geeizok-atis" scale.

Creativity guru Edward de Bono's latest book, entitled
"Surtition: Creating Value Monopolies When Everyone Else is
Merely Competing" offers some lessons. He claims there are three
"stages of business."

In the first, "Attention is on the product and on production."
That is, get it right.

Stage two focuses on the product relative to the competition:
"How can we do better or at least keep up?"

De Bono illustrates: "The Swiss watch industry invented the
quartz movement, but did not use the invention because it felt
(it) would kill their existing market. Anyone could use the
quartz movement, whereas only the Swiss had the skills to make
little cog wheels and balance springs.

They were right in their thinking. . .but wrong in their
strategy. Watchmakers in Japan and Hong Kong eagerly grabbed the
quartz movement, and in one year the sales of Swiss watches
dropped by 25 percent.

"What rescued the Swiss watch industry was a very unSwiss
concept of the Swatch. . .(It) signaled that telling time was no
longer the most important thing in a watch.